Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of electronic health records. In particular, the present invention is directed to a universal application integrator for automatically populating an electronic health record, and driving workflow automation to and from multiple clinical applications and devices that interface with the patient.
Description of the Related Art
Health care providers throughout the country are moving toward maintaining patient records electronically. These electronic health records (EHR) provide several advantages over paper-based records. For example, they can be accessed more rapidly by a health care provider; records do not need to be shipped from department to department to follow a patient throughout a facility; patients can be granted online access to their records, etc.
In order to populate an EHR, patient information must be entered into the record at some point during or following a visit. Patient information that is used to populate an EHR includes patient bibliographic information, narrative data, and vital statistics data. Bibliographic information includes information such as a patient's name, date of birth, address, and the like. Narrative data includes notes dictated or directly entered by a healthcare professional about the patient's condition. Vital statistics include data measured and recorded about a patient's condition—for example, the patient's heart rate, blood pressure, and temperature. Measured vital data can also include the results of an ECG, ultrasound or other test that provides data. Typically, vital statistics data (also referred to as “vitals”) are recorded and then manually entered into the patient's EHR.
According to the American College of Clinical Engineering (ACCE) and IHE, there are 1500 patient care device manufacturers with over 3500 different products. Each of these clinical devices captures information from patients that needs to be disseminated to the caregiver; currently, much of that information is delivered in a non-standardized fashion.
Further, patient care workflow can involve many different healthcare professionals such as nurses, doctors, lab technicians and technologists all capturing data on patient care devices and from different applications detached from the providers who determine care. Since this data is currently not captured in real time and disseminated to the clinical decision makers in real-time, patient safety can suffer.
Many patient care devices such as vitals monitors include USB or serial communication ports in order to allow the device to be connected to a computer for printing the stored vitals. However, since these devices typically have no notion of which patient is attached to the device, the readouts and paper that are currently manually captured can be mixed up between patients. Even for those devices that do allow some integration, there is currently no provision to automatically link the data to a current patient encounter.